Outlook is a
wonderful program for managing your email but the problem is that it can be
difficult to work with especially when you want to make sure your email system
is backed up. Think of an Outlook file as a massive database where your emails
are entries to that database and not individual messages.

Because it is
a database, this first section will be about making sure your Outlook file is
clean and problem free. The second section will be on managing those Outlook
files. Outlook has been around since the early days of Microsoft Office and has
changed radically with the changes in Office. I don’t intend this article to be
about how to use Outlook, just on how to make sure that when you use it, it has
not been corrupted and is clean and workable.

In Outlook, a
personal folder file is a file with a.pst extension which is usually stored on
your computer's hard disk or on a company server. Personal folder files contain
messages, forms, attachments notes, calendar, address book, and other message
folders. You can work with a personal folder file as you would with any other
file and you can copy or move a .pst file to another location on your computer
or a server. These files allow you to work with your email when you are not
connected to the server or the internet.

Personal
Folder files can get very large. It is not uncommon for a .pst file to grow to
over 10 gigabytes in size, way too much to be held on a DVD disc, so saving them
offline can be difficult. If you have a ton of emails (say over a few thousand)
with lots of attachments that you leave attached to the messages, then the
solution is to have multiple .pst files and the good news is that they can still
all be available in Outlook all at the same time.

So first of
all, make sure you know what versions of Outlook you have on each computer. With
Outlook 2007 & 2010, hit the file tab and then click on help. Next would be to
make sure you have all of the updates for the version of Outlook you have. In
Outlook 2010, you would click on File / Help and then Check for Updates. Also
probably a good time to make sure your version of Windows is up to date as well
by clicking on Start / Programs / Windows Update.

If Outlook
does not appear to work very well, you might want to repair your personal file
folders. Go to Microsoft’s Search site and look for "Inbox Repair Tool" and of
course, the instructions will vary by what version of Outlook you are using. For
Outlook 2003 and earlier, it is a file scanpst.exe which is located on your hard
drive. For Outlook 2007 & 2010, it is located on the first Office CD or you can
get it here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=272227

Keep reading below for tips
on cleaning up your Outlook data files and making them manageable.

Managing Outlook Data Files

Normally, you
wouldn’t really need to worry about how Outlook manages files but if you need
access to several emails from within Outlook on a different computer, there are
a few ways of getting it done. One would be to simply email the messages to you
to another account. Another would be to save individual messages as a text file
and not deal with the Outlook data file structure. Just open up the message you
want and click /file/save as/. If there is an attachment you need with it, you
simply copy that attachment to any folder on your computer. To export messages
to a text file, look at these instructions here:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aetw.html.

If you need
access to more than just a few messages, it gets far more difficult. Remember
that Outlook is a database so just copying off messages or a folders worth of
messages to another file to be able to read them will not work very well and in
fact, you need to have Outlook available on the other computer that you are
going to read these messages. If you don't have the same version of Outlook on
that other computer, you need to take special care in copying over the folders
to make them compatible with that version of Outlook.

Outlook does
an excellent job of allowing you to manage your email into subject folders.
When you first start Outlook, you have the basic folders of Inbox, Drafts, Sent
Items, and Deleted Items. All are subfolders of the main Outlook database. You
can right click on Outlook and add as many folders as you like and then move
your messages to the various folders. I even set up rules to grab a message when
it comes in and automatically move it to its appropriate folder. If there is a
new message in one of the folders, it will be in bold with a number beside it
indicating how many new unread messages are in that folder so it is easy to spot
the new mail when it comes in.

Outlook 2010
makes it much easier to deal with the .pst files. If you have an older version
of Outlook, you may have to do a Google search to find out more information.
Indiana University has a good reference article (from what this is based on) at:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aesn.html
- the following is from IU.

4.The Create
or Open Outlook Data File
window will open. From the drop-down menu next to "Save In:", select a location
to store the personal folder file.

5.In the "Filename:"
field, enter a filename for the folder file (e.g., Becky's
Personal Folder File). A
.pst extension will be
added automatically.Note: This is the name for the .pst
file only. You will need
to name the folder separately (see next step).

6.Click OK.
You will now see the Create
Microsoft Personal Folders
window. The name that you supply here will appear among your mail folders in
Outlook; use a name that is related to the contents of the folder. For example,
if you named the.pst
file Becky's
Personal Folder File, then
you may want to name this folder Becky's
Personal Folder.

When you set
up a new .pst file, in Outlook, it will appear at the bottom of the folder list.
If you have messages groups in folders, you can easily move or copy them from
one folder to another either individually or in large groups. Brush up on your
drag and drop and cut/copy/paste procedures if you are not sure how to do all
that.

Outlook .pst
files have no theoretical limit on the size of the file but experience has shown
that with versions prior to Outlook 2007, if your file size gets larger than 2
gigabytes, you will have problems. A couple of tips; one would be to remove the
attachments especially if they are videos or pictures. They take up a lot of
space. 2nd would be to empty the "deleted items" folder. When you delete a
message, it goes there and they can pile up. If you send a lot of email, you
might also empty the "sent items" folder. Those three things will do wonders to
the size of your .pst file.

To see how
large your .pst files are, in Outlook 2010, go to the Data Files tab in steps 1
& 2 above and just highlight the default .pst file listed there. Click on the
"Open File Location" and it will open a new explorer window of your Outlook data
files and you can then see how large the .pst file has become. From this
window, you can then copy those .pst files to a USB memory drive or stick
(assuming it is large enough to store the data files) for moving to another
computer.

From this
window, you also see where on your computer that the files are stored. If you
are going to copy one of those .pst files to another computer, you will also
need to know where on that computer the Outlook files are stored and the best
way to do that is to again follow the steps 1 & 2 above. You need to remember
where it is stored on your computer because after you copy the .pst file to the
new location, you need to then tell Outlook that you are going to use it. Go
through steps 1 and 2 above and when the window opens up, instead of typing in a
new file name, just select the file that you have just copied to this new
computer. Outlook will then recognize the new file at the bottom of the list of
folders.

Those USB
Memory sticks are a great way to backup you your Outlook files, another would be
to get a USB external drive and use the backup software that comes with it.
Either way, you will be sure you have all your email messages.